By Kurt Anthony Krug

Photo by Martin Vloet, U-M Photo Services Zettel

To explore what it means to be human, storytellers create alien beings and civilizations. That's the paradox underlying science fiction, and alumna Sarah Zettel is proving very adept at exploiting it, especially in plots known as "first-contact" stories. In a first-contact tale, "human beings meet an alien race for the first time," explains Zettel, 35, who graduated in 1988 with a BA in communications. She has written five novels in the past five years and is well under way on a trilogy. "History has seen plenty of first-contact incidents, where one group meets another for the first time."

Sometimes, the interactions have led to "violence and misunderstandings, to long, old feuds that we are still very much dealing with to this day," Zettel says. And sometimes the different groups wind up getting along quite well. But at the crux of such interactions are the questions that most interest Zettel: "How do we see each other as human beings?" and, "What is human?" Her debut novel, Reclamation (1996, Aspect Books), explores that philosophical terrain.

Retaining the core of humanity
Reclamation takes place in a future in which humanity has evolved along separate branches. "Primarily, these branches refer to the locations where human beings have settled," Zettel says. "Some stayed on their home world and their history and culture took them in one direction. Others became completely space-faring and this took their history and culture in other directions. Some settled on other worlds, and this took them in yet a third direction. Each branch of human beings moved further and further out from all the others until each became the others' legends and each evolved separate ideas about who they were and who else could be called 'human.' It's an exploration of how far we can go and still retain that core of humanity, whatever that is, and how far do we go before we stop seeing each other as human beings, as all one people."

Zettel grew up in Buffalo, New York, and Trenton, Michigan. She learned to read out of The Wizard of Oz and has been writing since the fourth grade. "Ancestor-wise, I'm mostly Scottish and German," she says, adding that zettel means notepaper in German and therefore she may have been destined to be a writer. "On my mother's side my ancestors were cattle thieves, and on my father's they were messengers for German kings."

'Reading was the only adventure I had'
"I lived a lot of my life in suburban America," she says. "It's very safe, it's a great place to raise kids, it's got great schools—it's boring! Reading was an escape; it was the only adventure I had. The writing became an extension of the reading. It was a way to participate in adventures and discoveries I couldn't have in my real life, but I could have them vicariously."

At Michigan, she didn't take any of the science fiction courses, "because I'd already read so much of it, but I did take every writing course I could, including advertising and television writing, since I knew I wanted to make my living writing." She took just one creative writing course, however. "It opened my eyes to some language and ideas I hadn't considered before, but those courses are geared toward 'high' literature creation, and writing sci-fi is discouraged."

Playwrighting was her favorite course. "It was a senior level class, but you got in on a professorial interview," she recalls. "So, brash little freshman that I was, I walked in with my three-ring binder of things I had already written, which included scraps of plays, said I was a freshman, but look how much I had done, and I got in. I took the course three times for credit. That class taught me more about dialogue and visualizing scenes than any other. I would have been a playwright if my nerve had stretched that far."